‘Glass Onion’: Fakeouts, feints and fun

 

    Glass Onion is billed as A Knives Out Mystery, a title that links this generously entertaining movie to its 2019 predecessor. If you're familiar with the first movie, you already know that writer/director Rian Johnson will go heavy on cleverness, unsavory characters, and a plot that weaves its way through a preposterously complex series of events, some shown in flashback. 

    Aside from the central character, Daniel Craig's Benoit Blanc, super-sleuth with a southern accent, the movie boasts all new characters, a group of friends (Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom, Jessica Henwick, Dave Bautista,  Madelyn Cline, and Kate Hudson) who are invited to the private Greek island of tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton). 

   Bron wants his guests to spend a weekend playing a game in which he's the murder victim and they must figure out who "killed" the self-appointed "genius." All in fun, right?

    Not exactly. Johnson quickly dispenses with Bron’s game and gets down to the movie's real business. When Bron's estranged former business partner (Janelle Monae) turns up, the plot wheels start turning.

    It's a pleasure to see Craig play this role again, almost an antidote to his many appearances as James Bond. Manae creates a character of mystery, resentment, and cunning, and the rest of the cast plays along with Hudson enjoying a chance to go over the top as a once-successful model. 

     The Glass Onion, as it happens, is the name of the bar where the friends met in the days before Bron bought their loyalty by financing their various efforts.

    If you want to play around with possible connections to the Beetle song from the White Album (also titled Glass Onion) go ahead, but I’m not sure the movie requires that much head-scratching. 

   A few explosive flourishes make it seems as if a leftover summer movie breeze blew through Johnson's mind, pushing Glass Onion onto a larger stage than we might expect for this kind of movie. And, a confession: It’s difficult for me to be entirely gleeful when a movie veers into franchise territory. 

   But these days, such sentiments are about as useful as complaining about the weather, and, for the most part, Johnson acquits himself well, keeping his story percolating through its many fakeouts and feints.

A hit-and-miss portrait of Gloria Steinem

      Few would argue that Gloria Steinem -- one of the founders of Ms. magazine and a leading voice in the latter-day feminist movement -- helped transform American life. Fair to say, then, that Steinem deserves a biopic. 

    I'm not sure that The Glorias, which was directed by Julie Taymor, qualifies as that movie. The Glorias proves sweeping and general, often outlining the social and personal parameters that defined Steinem's life.

    Perhaps Taymor was trying for a biopic-plus, a movie about a woman and also about a movement from which her life proves inseparable. 

    But at two hours and 17 minutes, the resultant film often outsmarts itself by juggling time and by including embellishments such as scenes of Steinem in dialogue with herself: the older Steinem talking to the younger Steinem, for example.

     Four actresses play Steinem at different ages. Ryan Kiera Armstrong plays Gloria as a child. Lulu Wilson handles the teen-age years. Alicia Vikander and Julianne Moore take over adulthood.

     The most developed relationship in the film involves Gloria and her father (Timothy Hutton). Hutton's Leo Steinem moved the family around as he drifted from one scheme to another. His instability and hucksterism may have helped drive Steinem's mother (Enid Graham) into extended bouts of depression and anxiety.

    At the same time, Steinem shows affection for her often-absentee father whose unbridled -- if unjustified -- optimism is not without charm. He's one of those men who insist on improvising their way through life.

     A post-college trip to India seems illustrative of what keeps The Glorias from soaring. Traveling alone in India, the adventurous Steinem mingles with the poor, honing her social conscience. 

      But the trip to India, like other of the movie's segments,  feels as if it were designed to display one of Steinem's many admirable traits, in this case, her concern for lower-caste women.

    Put another way, too much of what happens in The Glorias feels pre-programmed rather than discovered. We're making stops at key biographical points rather than leaping into an unfolding world of possibility.

    Maybe because the journalism in the late '50s and '60s was such a far cry from the journalism of the 21st century, I was most interested in Steinem's life as a young woman newly arrived in New York. 

     An aspiring writer and recent Smith graduate, Steinem -- played by Vikander at this point -- lands a series of jobs with various organizations, The New York Times among them. Editors persistently try to push her into the world of soft features. She wants her work to hit harder.

    One of her articles, a 1963 expose of what it's like to work as a bunny at a Playboy Club, attracts significant attention but threatens to typecast her. Her male editors want more of the same.

    By the time, Moore becomes Steinem in the movie's final going, The Glorias seems less a biopic than a look at a burgeoning movement with strong contributions from Bette Midler as Bella Abzug, Janelle Monae as Dorothy Pitman Luge, and Lorraine Toussaint as activist Flo Kennedy. 

    Taymor the keeps touching movement signposts,  perhaps because Steinem is wary about not turning herself into an icon. She wants the movement to get top billing.

    Steinem's transition from journalist to activist hardly coms as a surprise. Throughout Taymor's collage of a biography, Steinem remains a woman of courage and conviction.  She seems to have been born "woke." 

    Taymor has directed films (Titus, Frida, A Midsummer Night's Dream) and also is known for adventurous theater,  most prominently, The Lion King.  Here, she adds theatrical flourishes, self-conscious flights into surrealism that break the biopic mold but disrupt as much as they illuminate. 

     She also uses real news footage and shows the real Steinem at the 2017 Women's March in Washington, DC.  

    Steinem, who's now 86, has lived through many stages  of the women's movement. That means the movie serves as an important reminder of what life was like prior to the 1970s, prior to Roe v. Wade and prior to the arrival of women in important roles in business and public life.

    Many rightly will view The Glorias as call to take heed at a time when such gains are being threatened. Sexism and misogyny are still with us, of course, but that doesn't mean The Glorias couldn't have been better.

     The Glorias isn't a bad movie, but it teases us into wondering what might have been. 

A brutal look at slavery and beyond

   

     In the heat of our endlessly fractious moment, Antebellum — a movie about the lasting consequences of slavery  — should have scored a direct hit.

     Too bad directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz  squander some of their movie's power with a gimmicky Twilight Zone flourish that pushes the movie from its purposefully strange moorings into a lesser world, one in which contrivance smothers insight.

     Bush and Renz get off to a strong start with a beautifully orchestrated sequence that takes place on what appears to be a prototypical plantation. 

     An eerily bucolic mood prevails. Horses move slowly. Enslaved women, all uniformly dressed, hang the wash. Every trace of spontaneity seems to have been banished, something on the order of what Margaret Atwood accomplished in Handmaid's Tale.

    It doesn’t take long for the directors to reveal the horror that underlies the plantation's placid surface.  Antebellum understands that it's possible and perhaps even necessary to treat parts of American history as a horror story.

    The repellant brutalities of slavery are shown in painful detail, but even at that, this plantation seems slightly off-kilter.

     The enslaved aren't tormented by the genteel but twisted southerners typically associated with the Old South of movies. Instead, Confederate soldiers run the plantation. 

     They're  led by an officer (Eric Lange) whose quietly expressed sadism sets the tone. Not only is Lange's character a rapist, but he leads group chants of “blood and soil” that sound as if they've been borrowed from a Third Reich playbook.

     Imbuing her role with ferocity and conviction, Janelle Monae plays an enslaved woman named Eden. Eden's only objective: To escape her tormentors.

     A malicious white woman (Jena Malone) helps oversee the non-stop brutalization of those consigned to picking cotton and trying to avoid the smirking arrogance of Captain Jasper (Jack Huston), the officer who enforces the plantation's draconian rules.

    Because the enslaved workers aren’t allowed to speak to one another without permission, the encounters between Monae’s character and new arrival Julia (Kiersey Clemons) are fraught with tension. The normal made illicit by oppression.

    Those who haven’t read much about the movie deserve to approach Antebellum's plot without spoilers. 

    Know though that Gabourey Sidibe shows up in a small, lively role and that the directors take a leap that's obviously intended to throw an audience off guard as the movie tries to connect past and present.

      Unfortunately,  the story’s big reveal proves a letdown and some of the final images try so hard to become iconic that they play like quotations, poster-ready illustrations drawn from the cinematic language of revenge.

    Antebellum opens with a familiar high-minded quote from William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

     The malodorous vapors of American's "original sin" are still with us, but too often, Antebellum fails to live up to the seriousness to which it evidently aspires.  

     As a result, the movie's boldness -- and it has some -- jars more than it illuminates. 

Harriet Tubman reaches the screen

Cynthia Erivo gives one of the year's most compelling performances in director Kasi Lemmons' Harriet.

In Harriet, actress Cynthia Erivo comes across as a determined female warrior who battles the evils of slavery, freeing as many enslaved people as she can. With a face full of fury, Erivo creates a portrait of flinty resolve and unshakable faith. Tubman, who escaped slavery at the age of 27, became a "conductor" -- someone who guided the enslaved to freedom -- on the Underground Railroad. She already had won her freedom but wasn't satisfied, not when so many others were left behind to suffer.

As directed by Kasi Lemmons (Eve's Bayou and Talk to Me), Harriet paints a portrait of a woman who came to realize she had only one choice: Be free or die. Once Tubman decided that she'd rather be dead than enslaved, everything else followed.

In Maryland, Tubman was known as Minty. She grew up on a plantation and watched a sister being sold away from the family, an event that permanently scarred her, as did the lashes from the whips of slave masters.

Determined to flee, Tubman made a journey of 100 miles -- from Maryland to Philadelphia. She traveled alone.

Erivo creates a portrait of a woman possessed. Tubman was struck in the head as a child, an event that some say accounted for the religious visions that she claimed to have. Erivo's fierce portrayal leaves little doubt that if Tubman said she talked to God, you'd best believe her. She's like an American Joan of Arc. Employing a different religious reference, frustrated plantation owners dubbed her "Moses."

Part action hero and part American icon, the Harriet that emerges on screen kicks butt and, yes, that's satisfying, given the people whose butt she's kicking. A born leader, she refuses to allow anyone (even the politically cautious abolitionists she meets in Philadelphia) to define her.

The evil white slavers find their fullest representation in a character named Gideon Brodess (Joe Alwyn),
a severe slave master who won't rest until he returns Tubman to his plantation. At one point, he hires black slave hunters to help him in his quest. Gideon's mother (Jennifer Nettles) can be even worse, a hysterical woman who sees her beloved plantation sinking deeper into debt.

The movie's Philadelphia setting produces the movie's strongest supporting characters. Janelle Monae plays a woman who owns a boarding house and Leslie Odom Jr. portrays an abolitionist who introduces Tubman to the Underground Railroad. At various points in the movie, Clarke Peters appears as Tubman's father.

Lemmons sticks pretty much to surface, and, at times, Harriet seems more of an action movie than it needs to be. Put another way, Harriet sometimes feels more attuned to the demands of contemporary moviegoing than to rhythms that would have been more reflective of the period in which Tubman lived.

With Harriet, what you see is what you get and the movie emerges as a kind of primer on Tubman's life that's built around a compelling performance. I agree with those who think it should have been more than that, but Lemmons' big-screen biography sets its own terms and lives within them.

Race, not space, the final frontier

A little-known story about the black women who helped make the space program fly.

The old adage constantly seems to be proven wrong. What we don't know usually does hurt us -- or at least makes us intellectually and spiritually poorer.

Consider that while watching Hidden Figures, a movie about the little-known role played by a group of black women in the space program during the 1960s. Director Theodore Melfi deals with a story that has remained as hidden from most Americans as the women who inspired it.

Melfi delineates the racism experienced by black women employed by NASA in a pre-computer world in which humans did the necessary calculations for space missions, confirming the trajectories of rockets, for example. The sophisticated mathematical work conducted by these women was an essential part of NASA's operations.

The story focuses on three women played by a talented trio of actresses: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae.

Henson's Katherine Johnson receives the most attention. Johnson, a math whiz, is selected to leave the anonymity of the computation squad and work with the big boys in NASA's Space Task Group during a variety of important missions. Hell, in those days, all the missions seemed important.

Spencer's Dorothy Vaughan quickly realizes that computers eventually would replace the humans who did the calculating. So she learned about computers, and made her charges learn about them, as well. As a result, the women of the black computation pool were fully prepared to continue working when NASA began automating things that previously were done by hand.

It's interesting to recall a time when computers were room-sized; the one purchased by NASA didn't fit through the door to the room where it eventually was housed.

Finally, Monae's Mary Jackson pursues her ambitions by making the transition to a full-fledged engineer, a route that required defiance of Virginia norms in segregated education.

Melfi (St. Vincent) brings upbeat energy to his adaptation of Margot Lee Shatterly's book Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. The movie's star trio is more than equal to the task of showing us the inequities these women faced and the determination it took to overcome them.

We're talking about a time when bathrooms for the races were separate, when educated white engineers had difficulty believing black women possibly could be their equals, and when segregation was so ingrained that Johnson's white co-workers insisted that she drink from her own coffee pot.

Kirsten Dunst portrays an aloof supervisor who refuses to acknowledge that Spencer's Vaughan is doing the work of a supervisor -- work that Dunst's character couldn't begin to tackle. Still, Vaughn receives no extra pay.

Kevin Costner plays the gruff but understanding white guy who focuses on the mission to the exclusion of everything else, including race. Costner's Al Harrison insists that Johnson advance in the hierarchy by joining the Space Task Group. Johnson's skills in analytic geometry are better than anyone else's in the group, he realizes. End of story.

Jim Parsons takes the role of the opposition, a white engineer who has no interest in seeing black women enter a domain previously reserved for white men.

Too few of us know the story of these women, so Hidden Figures instantly qualifies as a revelation. Beyond that Henson, Spencer and Monae are playing women who succeed for reasons that most movie characters -- men and women included -- seldom do: They're smart.

For a movie about math wizards, the story is pretty much told by the numbers, but a talented cast gives Hidden Figures enough freshness to overcome its formulaic moments.

Besides, it's worth remembering that while sophisticated scientists and engineers were trying to reach the stars, social conditions at home didn't always reflect an equal amount of intelligence and daring.